November 24, 2015

What the War on Drugs was really about: "We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black"

In 1993, I was researching my first book, Smoke and Mirrors, which is the tale, starting in the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign, of how drugs were turned into a political weapon. I tracked down as many people as I could who had been involved in drug policy in the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and brand-new Clinton administrations. Among the first I found was John Ehrlichman, who was at the time doing minority recruitment for an engineering firm in Atlanta. He looked nothing then like he had when he’d been a principal Watergate villain in the early 1970s and an evil god in the bad-guy pantheon of my youth. By 1993, he was fat, and wore an Old Testament beard that extended far below the knot of his necktie. He impatiently waved away my earnest, wonky questions about drug policy.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the world-weary air of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war Left, and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Fortner's thesis is far from ironclad. He himself says in the introduction that black get-tough leadership was "not decisive" to the passage of punitive drug laws. Ignore the press around the book. The book tells a more nuanced tale. Black support for get-tough punishment gave Rockefeller an out; he could point to black support (which was very nominal and isolated to six Harlem ministers) to dismiss charges of racism. Not a single black elected official supported Rockefeller's drug laws. You don't see major black legislative support for tough drug laws until the crack epidemic of the 1980s.

So it's not an either/or. That framing is too political. The history is messier. (Also white law-and-orderism had way more political power than black law-and-orderism in the late 60s/early 70s.)

FWIW, PBS Frontline published online a chronology, "Thirty Years of America's Drug War."

For June 17, 1971, they state the following (please note the final sentence):

Nixon declares war on drugs.At a press conference Nixon names drug abuse as "public enemy number one in the United States." He announces the creation of the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP), to be headed by Dr. Jerome Jaffe, a leading methadone treatment specialist. During the Nixon era, for the only time in the history of the war on drugs, the majority of funding goes towards treatment, rather than law enforcement

The first Federal law outlawing a drug was passed in 1909. The Marihuana Tax Act was enacted in 1935.

There's a lot of points that could claim to be the beginning of this War on the American People. Nixon's callous use of it to further his own political ambitions and increase the power of the Federal government is just one of them.

Peter Moskos is a professor and chair of the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is the director of John Jay's NYPD Executive Master's Program, on the faculty of the City University of New York's Doctoral Programs in Sociology, and a Senior Fellow of the Yale Urban Ethnography Project.

Moskos graduated from Princeton (AB) and Harvard (PhD) and was a Baltimore City Police Officer. He has authored three books: Cop in the Hood, In Defense of Flogging, and Greek Americans.

Me in 2000

Me in 2016

Critical Acclaim for Cop in the Hood

Cops like the book, Cop in the Hood:

"Should be made mandatory reading for every recruit in the Balto. City Police Academy. ... I am so proud that you were a Baltimore Police Officer and a good one." —Colonel (ret.) Margaret Patton, Baltimore City Police Department

"I just finished reading the last footnote! Great stuff." —NYPD Lt. Detective (ret.) David Durk

"I have been a cop now for 23 years and your book really captured what it's like to be a street cop. . . . Great book, great insights." —Detective-Commander Joseph Petrocelli

"Moskos strips away hard to decipher cop-speak and sociological mumbo jumbo and presents something easily digestible by the average reader.... Moskos is a veteran of a war [on drugs] he disagrees with. But he has walked the walk, respects the brotherhood and, as far as I’m concerned, still bleeds blue." —Pepper Spray Me

"Truly excellent.... Mandatory reading for all fans of The Wire and recommended for everyone else." —Tyler Cowen

"Ethnographic chutzpah.... Perhaps the best sociological account on what it means to police a modern ghetto.... Tells a great story centered around notions of race, power and social control." —Andrew Papachristos, American Journal of Sociology

"[An] objective, incisive and intelligent account of police work. Moskos's graphic descriptions of the drug culture... are the most detailed and analytical to be found anywhere. —Arnold Ages, Jewish Post & Opinion

It could have profound consequences.... In Defense of Flogging forces the reader to confront issues surrounding incarceration that most Americans would prefer not to think about. —Mansfield Frazier, The Daily Beast

“Flogging” is intriguing, even in — or because of — its shocking premise. As a case against prisons, Mr. Moskos' is airtight. —Washington Times

Compelling… Although his outrageous idea may conjure up unsavory reminders of U.S. slavery, by the end of “In Defense of Flogging,” Moskos might just have you convinced. —Salon

One of the very few public-policy books I've encountered that goes past wringing its hands over a societal problem.... Moskos's sharp little volume has a potential audience far beyond the experts. —Rich Fisher, Public Radio Tusla

A very important work... provocative, timely, and well-argued. I agree with you completely that our criminal justice system is out of control.... On one hand, the problems seem intractable. On the other hand, we're doomed if we don't do something about it. —(Former) CIA Agent John Kiriakou

It was, in truth, a book that I could not put down. I read it in two sittings (my butt was hurting after the first!)... You did well. —Gary Alan Fine, John Evans Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University.